Professor Jane Millar:

I agree with the point Ms Bennett started with about the behaviour and cultural aims for universal credit. It is important to bear those in mind because they shape what universal credit looks like and the discourse around it on how it was responded to and received.

I will respond to the first point made by the committee member about means testing really. It is fundamentally about what you are trying to do with the means test. Are you really trying to respond to every little change that people have? One of the things we learned over the past few years is how much change there is in people's income circumstances. I do not think we were fully aware of that before. Over short time periods things can change quite rapidly. Do we really want a system that tries to respond to those all the time? Do we want to take account of short-term fluctuations and not really the longer-term underlying situation?

We talked about tax credits being an annual award period. It was an annual period but before that we had the family income supplement for people in work and family credit which was for six months. There can be different fixed periods. This would be a good reform for universal credit to be honest. I always argued that if it was awarded for a fixed period and if people's incomes went up during that period, then great. As the member said, that gives them an opportunity to have a bit more security, to settle down a little bit and to take advantage of that increase. If their income goes down, then you should top it up. If people are starting to fall into difficult circumstances, there should be a way to top up and not to try to respond constantly to what can often be not necessarily large fluctuations, although they are often large in terms of the amount of income people have, and not to try to respond all the time to every change that comes along.